Dish Doctor: Where did stew go wrong?

In this occasional series, food editor Joanna McQuillan Weeks aims to write a prescription to make your dish fit as a fiddle, sidestepping the pitfalls when you make it again.

Joanna McQuillan Weeks

Dear Dish Doctor: I am not much of a cook, which often leads to unpleasant results when I try to wing it in the kitchen. I've committed some doozies, I'll admit, but the dooziest of all, which occurred a couple years back, still haunts me. Perhaps you could provide me some closure.

I made a beef stew from scratch. Simple enough. All was going well until I decided that the broth was a tad thin. I knew from watching my husband — he's the regular cook of the household — that the ingredient in one of the tins in our cupboard makes stocks thicker. But I wasn't sure which one. So I had to guess.

Turns out baking powder was NOT the right choice. I tossed a generous tablespoon of it into the pot and the reaction was like an A-bomb explosion, mushroom cloud and all. The stew erupted all over the stove and required quite a bit of cleanup. Of course, the meal was a ruin. But I served the miserably salty stew anyway.

So tell me, Dish Doctor — where did I go wrong?

— Name Withheld Upon Request

You're right, Withheld, that's a doozy.

I'm presuming that you had put a good splash of red wine into the pot to flavor your beef stew, and that was a wise choice. However, that set up the acidic conditions that made for such a spectacular "A-bomb explosion" when you stirred in the baking powder.

Baking powder, you see, is a combination of "baking soda and dry acid salts such as monocalcium phosphate (MCP) and sodium aluminum sulfate (SAS)," according to "The Science of Good Food," by David Joachim and Andrew Schloss with a. Philip Handel Ph.D. (Robert Rose Inc., 2008).

When baking powder hits acidic ingredients, carbon dioxide gas is created. This is desirable when making baked goods, since those thousands of air bubbles help your product rise. But as you unfortunately discovered, it's not such a good thing when concocting beef stew.

So, the next time you want to thicken your beef stew (or any other gravy, for that matter), reach for flour, cornstarch or arrowroot. Or for a slightly fancier approach, try beurre manie.

Simplest often is best. Whisk a couple of tablespoons of flour, cornstarch or arrowroot into an equal amount of cold water, and then blend the mixture into your simmering liquid. Stir while the gravy thickens over the course of the next few minutes. Besides achieving the desired consistency, that additional cooking time also helps to get rid of the flavor of uncooked flour when that's what you're using.

"So, why can't I just dump the powder into the pot?" you might be asking. Once again the authors of "The Science of Good Food" explain it best: "Pure starches cannot be smoothly integrated into boiling liquid. They must first be softened in cold liquid so that the starch granules absorb a small amount of water and separate from one another. Adding dry starch directly to hot sauce causes the surface of the starch to gelatinize on contact, trapping the remaining starch inside the gelatinized coating, thus forming a lump."

Lumpy gravy ... bad.

As for beurre manie, it's something I learned about from Julia Child. Well, not directly from her, of course, but from her book, "The Way to Cook," which contains a great recipe called Zinfandel of Beef, a hearty, wine-enhanced braise.

Here's what Child has to say on the subject: "Beurre manie — meaning literally butter and flour worked to a paste with your impeccably clean fingers — is the traditional sauce thickener for informal stews ...

"Proceed as follows: for each cup of sauce, mash 1 tablespoon of butter to a smooth paste with 1 tablespoon of flour, using a rubber spatula if you wish. Remove the sauce from heat, whisk in the butter-flour paste, and when thoroughly absorbed, bring briefly to the boil and the sauce will thicken — if not thick enough, repeat the process with, say, 1/2 tablespoon each of flour and butter."

So that about covers thickening stew, Withheld. Good luck with your next attempt, and save the baking powder for cookies and cakes.

Joanna McQuillan Weeks is food editor of The Standard-Times, and yes, she loves to cook. Contact her at foodedit@s-t.com.

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